This invention relates to electric motor manufacturing equipment, and more particularly to electric motor manufacturing equipment which is capable of simultaneously processing two or more electric motor parts. Additionally, this invention relates to electric motor manufacturing equipment having gripper apparatus for transferring electric motor components in both directions between a conveyor of an electric motor component production line and the manufacturing equipment. In particular, the preferred gripper apparatus of this invention can accommodate components of various sizes with little or no special setup to vary the size, and has integral apparatus for rotating components to desired angular orientations.
In production lines for electric motor components--e.g., production lines for armatures or stators--it is customary for the components, in their various stages of formation, to travel along a conveyor, alongside of which are disposed various workstations at which electric motor manufacturing equipment perform the different operations necessary to form the components. In such a production line, the component is removed from the conveyor by appropriate robotic or other transfer apparatus, moved to the manufacturing equipment and held there while that workstation's operation is performed, and then returned to the conveyor.
There is increasing interest among electric motor manufacturers in electric motor manufacturing equipment which can be set up to process two or more different types of electric motor parts in a single production run (so-called mixed production). There is also increasing interest in equipment which achieves greater throughput by processing two or more parts simultaneously or substantially simultaneously. On the other hand, it is not desirable to increase the floor space occupied by the equipment because this increases space cost, increases the cost of whatever conveyor apparatus is used to carry parts throughout the system, increases parts travel time throughout the system, makes the system more difficult to observe, etc.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide improved apparatus for simultaneously processing multiple electric motor parts.
It is another object of this invention to provide apparatus for simultaneously processing multiple electric motor parts which may be the same or different, and which can be easily changed from time to time.
It is still another object of this invention to provide apparatus for simultaneously processing multiple electric motor parts without substantially increasing the floor space or conveyor run length required to similarly process electric motor parts one at a time.
Additionally, the transfer apparatus of electric motor manufacturing equipment of the present invention usually includes a gripper for actually picking up and holding the component. Frequently, the gripper also rotationally indexes the component if the particular workstation requires a particular angular orientation of the component to perform its operation.
When assembling motors of different sizes, it is usually necessary to reconfigure the production line to accommodate the different-sized components, such as armatures. Such reconfiguration includes removing the grippers at each workstation and replacing them with grippers of a different size. Grippers that can handle more than one size are not generally available. Providing a gripper that can handle components of more than one size is particularly complicated when the component must be rotationally indexed. Rotational indexing is frequently measured in the case of armatures by the positions of the core slots, which have a defined angular spacing. However, in armatures of different sizes, the angular spacing of the core slots can differ.
It is therefore an additional object of this invention to provide apparatus for processing electric motor parts which has gripper apparatus for gripping electric motor components of different sizes.
It is also an object of this invention to provide apparatus for processing electric motor parts which has gripper apparatus that can rotationally index electric motor components of different sizes.